


A Cerulean Tale

by TeaJay (LoreWren)



Series: Tales Cerulean [1]
Category: Exalted (Roleplaying Game)
Genre: Anal Sex, Bad BDSM Etiquette, Consensual, Culture Shock, Demons, Hot Lintha-on-mortal action, Light BDSM, Lintha (Exalted), Lintha Culture & Customs, M/M, Orgasm Control, Pirates, Sexual Frustration, Sword & Song (setting), Trans Character, Trans Male Character, Tya (Exalted), Xenophilia
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-03
Updated: 2021-01-03
Packaged: 2021-03-13 22:06:50
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 3,394
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28535613
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LoreWren/pseuds/TeaJay
Summary: He gestured broadly, settling on a barrel like a throne. “Play something.”I blinked and glanced around, looking for our captain, or at least someone in a position of power—The Lintha admiral made a sound. It might have been their version of clearing a throat, or a growl. Regardless, it reminded me he was not human, and was unlikely to appreciate my bowing to a mortal in his presence.
Relationships: Admiral Verithine/Teller of Tales Cerulean, Lintha/Human, OMC/OMC
Series: Tales Cerulean [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2097711
Kudos: 5





	1. Chapter 1

My knees were unsteady in a way they hadn’t been on a ship in a very long time.

Pirates were always a risk on the sea, but they were easily enough handled,one way or another. I’d been on a handful of ships that had fought them, but far more often the risk of handing over cargo was accepted as a possibility. Hedge your bets, keep some stuff in another hold you hope they don’t find, whatever you preferred.

The ocean is the ocean. You plan for disaster and you may make it out alive.

Our captain was the sort more inclined to fight, see if a pirate ship could be sunk or warned off, and a few shots had been fired before the first flashes of silver on blue.

Lintha.

The captain called to stop firing, not that anyone needed the order by that point. We’d accepted pirates or storms, not _Lintha_.

They boarded us faster than anything I’d ever seen, or maybe I stood frozen for too long. Either way, I saw the captain of the other ship—too far to see any epaulets he might be wearing, but he had striking armor and was the one giving orders.

If you’d asked, I would’ve said that he’d have his crew throw a board down so he could walk across, or, if he’d had a flare for the dramatic, he might have some magic woven in the rigging that let him swing over.

He jumped from one ship to the other, landing like a cat: coiled, quiet, quick. His tone was light and friendly right up until someone did try fighting, and then the rumble of his voice would have been enough for intimidation even without the strange curved sword held to the idiot’s throat.

When he looked at me my grip tightened on my lute. It wasn’t worth my life, but it was _mine,_ in a way precious few things were. He didn’t reach for that, though, or my coin purse, instead tilting my head up enough for me to notice I’d been avoiding his eyes. 

That part of the stories seemed to be true. Not just blue-skinned but red-eyed, pupils slit like a nocturnal predator, drawn thin against daylight. 

I swallowed. His hand was warm, and he had that same sense of easy familiarity he’d been showing everyone who cooperated. My eyes dropped back down, hitting mouth and throat and flowing cloth barely covering muscle before I decided eyes was a safer option. From his smirk, he’d noticed.

“And what’s your name?”

I swallowed and forced my voice deeper. Did Lintha have tya? I knew on occasion Raksha would judge gender just by clothing, or something mortals didn’t understand. Demons might be the same? “Teller of Tales Cerulean, sir.”

“That’s a mouthful.” He grinned. I remembered stories of Lintha tearing into still-live flesh, wondering what kind of mouthful he meant. “Admiral Verithine. You’re the ship’s bard?”

That was not a question I had expected, so reflexes surfaced. “For the moment, yes. I play for passage.”

“Do you?” Verithine let my chin go, nails scraping lightly on their way past. It didn’t feel like a threat. Too consistent for an accident. “It’s been too long since I’ve heard a good song.” He gestured broadly, settling on a barrel like a throne. “Play something.”

I blinked and glanced around, looking for our captain, or at least someone in a position of power—

The Lintha admiral made a sound. It might have been their version of clearing a throat, or a growl. Regardless, it reminded me he was not human, and was unlikely to appreciate my bowing to a mortal in his presence.

After swallowing my heart back out of my throat, I strummed my lute to check the tuning. _None of the songs about turning back pirates,_ I thought. _Nothing too regional, something light and simple, possibly a bit baudy._

“Ohhhh Johnny be fine and Johnny be fair he wants me for to wed  
“And I would marry Johnny but my father up and said,  
”‘I’m sorry to tell you, daughter, what your mother never knew,  
” ‘But Johnny he’s a son of mine, and so is kin to you.’”

After the first verse Verithine took up a stomping rhythm, and I played off jumping out of my skin with a spinning leap, dancing around and through obstacles, playing at considering suitors from either of the ships. The Lintha seemed to quite enjoy, “He’s not the one who sired you, so marry who you will,” laughing so hard they nearly drowned out the chorus. By then, a fair few were playing along, nudging each other towards the “pretty bard boy” and trading jests I didn’t understand in whatever tongue they shared.

“William, he’s my husband, and he comes at my call,” I finished with a bow to Verithine, holding it both to catch my breath and because I wasn’t sure what the etiquette was.

Stomps turned to applause and whistles, and Captain Verithine hauled me up hard enough I briefly lost my feet. “Well done! You said they were just paying you passage? How’d you like to make a cut, little bard?”


	2. Chapter 2

Verithine’s ship was Lintha, and from a Lintha perspective, I would be a cousin—the lowest rank that had a name—since I had not been born into the family, and had made no great contributions of funds, contacts, or skill.

But Verithine’s ship was also renegade, and no one on it was family in the way most Lintha would mean it. They often freed slaves, out of some combination of pride and a practical view of what that did to a person’s loyalty, and they harried and robbed and killed. That last perhaps should have bothered me more, but the ocean is the ocean. And, admittedly, I enjoyed watching people do things they were good at.

Verithine was good at a great number of things.

Most of the Lintha had some predatory air to them, but Verithine’s had….a grace? A solidity? I’d been working the story about my joining the crew and stumbling over his description, trying comparisons to tigers, whales, crocodiles, or describing pieces rather than the whole, cords of muscle under skin that shared the scent and varying shades of the waves, blades that clipped through flesh like ships slicing water, voice deep and welcoming and lethal as the sea.

I may also have started telling gradually more directed stories, gauging reactions. They liked hearing human songs and tales sometimes, and if I told of a tya sea-lord or pirate when they asked for something adventurous, well, what self-respecting Western bard didn’t know a few.

I still wasn’t sure if they knew what a tya _was_. Though the way things were going, it didn’t seem to matter much—they either didn’t understand when I was flirting or weren’t interested, so if they didn’t know they weren’t likely to. 

The lintha certainly did fuck. They weren’t quiet, either during or after the fact, and it wasn’t as though they kept to mated pairs. And they _seemed_ interested, whistling and eyeing and making comments when I set them up appropriately, but whenever it might have gone physical they were suddenly busy. 

Honestly, it was getting distracting. I had had longer dry spells, but usually not ones where I got as far as working out the specifics before having to work things out on my own, and never so consistently. Even then in my own hammock, getting off without interruption was impossible, and I didn’t care for _that_ to be how they found out what a tya was.

Sum all that, and I found myself having trouble trying to make a story about what had happened rather than one where Verithine picked me up and carried me to his quarters. Or the mess. Or the brig, if I were in the mood for a lashing. 

Emotions bleed into a performance, and the Lintha ship was well equipped with props—even moreso than other ships I’d seen, Lintha seemed to enjoy having penises carved into the ship’s wood, and many of them made fine handholds during the right sort of story. And directing the raunchier jokes at the captain always went over well with a crew.

After one performance that had gone particularly well, I winked at him and made my exit in his direction, brushing close to him. Setup or not, I did catch my breath when he caught my wrist.

I smiled. “Aye, captain?”

“Are you waiting on permission to speak freely, little bard?” he rumbled, setting a pleasant thrill low in my belly.

“Hm…” I looked lazily around the ship. “I have been wondering how accurate these woodcarvings are. When humans make similar sculptures they tend to be rather exaggerated in certain details.” His eyebrows went up just enough for me to take it as permission to continue. “But I confess I haven’t had a chance to examine one in person. Is there a primary source I could reference?”

Verithine made a sharp bark over a chest-deep purr, a sound I’d come to learn was a Lintha laugh, and it only got louder as he threw me over his shoulder. “Kartika! Keep the ship in one piece. You know where to find me!”

He tossed me into his bed. A _bed_. Of course he had one, in a rich enough fleet that even I had a hammock to myself, but I very nearly forgot myself in the luxury of lying in one. 

The cushions shifted as he settled beside me. “I certainly hope you’re not about to fall asleep there, little bard.” 

I cracked an eye to find him on his side, propped on one elbow. Oh, lovely. “I wasn’t planning on it.” I ran my hand down his chest, intending to reach for his cock, but he’d set us at eye-level with each other, and the end of my reach brushed just below his navel. His pupils widened, rounding in the remains of the light from the bullseye glass window.

“Patience, little bard,” he said, catching my hand. “We have time.”

The blood throbbing to my groin was in strong disagreement on that score, but his mouth on mine silenced any objection I might voice. I pressed into him and rolled us over, settling myself on top in the moment that surprise allowed me. “The last several occasions I thought that, your crew seemed to lose their nerve,” I said, nipping my way down exposed bits of skin. Far too much armor still on him, where were the buckles?

Verithine laughed again, an entirely different and distracting sensation when I was straddling him. Forget the armor. “Did they? Mm. I wonder if they were waiting for permission.”

I had been sliding down his body and I stopped. I raised one eyebrow. “Permission,” I said, flatly.

“Well.” He gestured at the room, the ship, the fleet. “Lintha tradition. No sex outside marriage.”

“I have nearly walked in on orgies.”

“You haven’t seen a Lintha orgy.”

“ _Captain._ ”

He looked at the ceiling for a moment. “How would you think of it...you don’t have sex unless your…” Clearly searching for a way to express a word that didn’t translate. “Your superiors arrange the match. But they arrange as many matches as they like.”

“So what, the whole crew is matched?”

I had thought I was joking; his expression corrected me. “Close enough.”

Memories clicked into place. I _had_ been reading interest, and what it had reminded me of, more than anything else, was flirting with someone whose arranged spouse was nearby. They will go exactly so far, and then have to be seen to stop. Which...also explained the sheer _number_ of Lintha walking in on me masturbating.

I hadn’t noticed how long I’d been silent thinking that through until Verithine sat up and cupped my spine, hand reaching from nape to halfway up my skull. “Well,” he rumbled into my ear, “are we going to sit here quietly for the next few hours?”

I rolled my hips down in his lap, enjoying his growl. “Gods, no.”

“ _Rrrr,_ good boy.” His hands reached under my robe to run nails along my waist, then down to the band of my pants. I began to rise up to give him room when I remembered.

“Um.”

His hands stilled instantly. _Well. That’s attractive._ “Yes.”

“Do you...know what a tya is?” I fumbled out, warmth flowing up my face.

A brief, incredulous look. “Yes. You are one.”

I thought a quick, devoted prayer of thanks to any proximate gods and rolled up again to reach Verithine’s mouth, forceful enough to knock him on his back. For approximately an instant.

He rumbled into my mouth then twisted us into a wrestling match that lasted a few minutes before he abruptly stopped humoring the efforts of an untrained combatant half his size. I writhed underneath him, trying to move without breaking the arm he had behind my back.

“Yield, little bard.”

I shivered. “Where’s the fun in that?”

“Yield,” he growled, “and tell me what you want me to do to you.”

I whined, high in my throat, embarrassingly loud. “Fuck me, please.”

He spoke with the simple patience of a man who was going to get what he wanted. “I know you have better words than that.”

I squirmed, trying desperately to press friction back into him. For a moment, I did so well that he used his second hand to hold me down. “Captain Verithine, please, I want your cock up my ass, I want to feel you come in me, I want you to fuck me until I can’t walk, please, please, please.” My voice cracked on the last word as he rolled his hips so I could feel the press of his dick through fabric.

“Is that all?” 

I felt my voice rise to its more natural register. “Don’t stop, don’t stop, please don’t stop.”

Verithine made a sound so deep it thrummed through me, hooking one hand to flip my robe up and pull my waistband down. “Not so long as you’re a good boy. Now stay here until I move you.” He changed his grip on my arm, moving it to let me brace myself then pulling my ass up. He stopped touching me for a moment and I couldn’t help the tremble.

A drawer opened and closed, something in it opened, a faint kitchen smell, then one slick finger in me, enough sensation that I collapsed.

“What did I say, Ceru?”

 _Oh._ I _liked_ my taken name in that voice, rough and deadly and just a little inhuman. “Sorry, sorry, please,” I panted, forcing my knees to cooperate. 

“There’s a good little bard.” I had exactly enough experience to know that he had more. He worked me open just quickly enough that it burned, not so fast that we ever needed to stop, curling his fingers when I was still enough for his tastes, stilling himself and waiting when I wasn’t, over and over, in a pattern that seemed calculated to keep me from finding any release.

“Please—I—I—plea—“

He laughed low in my ear and I made a few noises that weren’t words. “Tell you what. You get a full sentence out and I’ll fuck you.”

I stiffened. “I am fully— _ffffffuck._ ” Teeth, sharp teeth sinking into my ear hard enough I expected blood, and then his _tongue_.

“What was that?”

“I, I s-said—“ And then I was waiting for pain and it was just his breath, hot and close over sweat-slick skin. “I said I am a, a bard and I c-can get a f-f-full sentence out whenever I wa- _ant._ ”

I bit my lip as he slid his fingers out of my ass, trying desperately not to beg, as though I hadn’t already. “So you can.”

My spine arched on its own, my head on his shoulder as Verithine pulled me into his lap, onto his cock. I _had_ assumed the imagery on Lintha ships was stylized, or at least exaggerated, and the size certainly was—I didn’t feel as though a forearm was fucking me—but the shape was...different.

“Now tell me what you are.”

Reflexively, “Teller of Tales Cerulean, wandering sea-bard, pleased to meet you.”

Verithine laughed, and laughed harder when I writhed from the sensation. “Not bad.” He wrapped his hand around my throat and opened me up, somehow managing to make his tongue in my mouth the more obscene movement. “But not what I meant.”

I flushed deep. “I’m a slut for you, sir,” I tried, easier to keep my pitch low after that kiss.

“Mm...not bad, but I don’t think you’ve earned that honor until I’ve had you fuck at least a few of my crew.” I shuddered. His hands tightened around my hips, and he set a slow, consistent pace, one that didn’t speed even as I squirmed and twisted and shook. “Try again.”

I whined.

“Try again,” he said in that same tone he’d had with a blade in his hand, “or I’ll stop.”

“I’m your, I’m—“ I couldn’t remember the word, slipped into Seatongue, “ _I’m your bitch, please, please, I need it.”_

“ _You sure do seem to like the idea of being_ mine.”

“ _Yes, please, yes.”_

“ _And if I tell my bitch he isn’t coming tonight?”_

A sound tore its way out of me, closer to a wounded animal than anything intentional. “ _Captain, Admiral, please, please, need to come, please can’t think, please.”_

“ _Seems to me a bitch that argues with its master needs training._ ”

I shuddered hard. “ _Y-yes, Master.”_

“ _Louder.”_

“ _Yes, Master!”_

He pressed one arm tight and flat against my chest, the other hand under my thigh to open me up. “Now tell me again that you’re my bitch, nice and loud so the whole ship can hear.”

“Oh, gods, I’m your bitch, I need your cock, please, use me please!”

“Louder.”

I tried to get a breath in my diaphragm and it took three tries before I could get used to the feel of it with a dick that deep in me. “I—I’m your bitch!”

“Good boy. Now come.”


	3. Chapter 3

I stared at the ceiling, wondering how long I could stay in here for. Verithine ate in here sometimes, right? Maybe I could just hold out until people forgot about—that.

_ Yes, and then you’d be the bard who screamed he was the captain’s bitch and then didn’t leave captain’s quarters for a fortnight. Much better. _

Besides, maybe Verithine did this often. I’d certainly slept closer to two lovers and said nothing beyond a raised eyebrow or a raunchy song the next day. And if the captain were in the habit of bedding bards, some of them would be loud.

* * *

Raised eyebrows: no. Raunchy jokes: yes. Emphatically yes. Also gestures, and some particularly vivid descriptions of what we’d done, most of which were….at least exaggerated. On one occasion Kartika—the first mate—came to my mock defense, saying they shouldn’t say such things because if the captain had fucked me he would’ve split me in half.

I didn’t have much room to argue outside of insisting that I was fully capable of fitting Verithine’s dick inside me, which did not seem terribly compelling. 

“Hey, bard! Planning on giving us a little more entertainment tonight?”

_...Now there’s an idea. _

I grinned and gave a sweeping bow, settling my lute in my hands as I straightened. “Of course!

“Farewell and adieu to you Nexan ladies   
“Farewell and adieu, fair neckèd dames   
“For we’ve received orders for to sail for the Isle   
“But we hope in a short time we’ll see you again!”

It was a popular enough tune, and they picked up on my choice of emphasis well enough by the time we reached “hove our ship to,” and “up the channel did make”, singing and roaring along at the right moments.

I held the last note long enough for some heckles about how long I’d be able to do a variety of other things that occupied the mouth, and then bowed to another general roar of appreciation. “Any other requests?”

“More than a few, but I’d have to ask the admiral first!”

“Well then maybe you should get the nerve to do it,” I laughed, a challenge and a triumph. 


End file.
